Nigel Farage’s promise to ban working from home if Reform are elected is undoubtedly the kind of policy that grabs headlines – but it falls apart the moment you think about how people actually work in the UK in 2026.
Proponents of banning work from home misunderstand what many businesses have already settled on: neither a permanent retreat into our spare bedrooms nor a return to five-days-a-week commuting, but a mixed, managed approach that gets the best out of both.
Farage has described home working as “a load of nonsense” and argued people are “more productive” in person.
I agree that in-person time matters. Our experience supporting SMEs up and down the UK has shown us that teams do better when they can build trust, onboard properly, solve hard problems quickly and feel like a part of something.
But turning that into a blanket ban is a blunt instrument in a world where the evidence (and employer behaviour) points to hybrid working as the new norm, and one that can often give businesses a competitive advantage.
Hybrid is already “normal” for a large portion of the UK
Working from home is no longer a niche perk. The Office for National Statistics reports that more than a quarter of working adults in Great Britain are hybrid working; the House of Commons Library revealed that around 27% of employees work partly from home, with a further share working fully remotely.
This matters because the UK labour market has already adapted in job design, employee expectations, commuting, childcare arrangements and office footprints, among other things. A ban wouldn’t automatically “bring people back together”; it would force both employers and employees into a disruptive reset with real costs with no guarantee of improved outcomes.
Productivity isn’t the slam dunk some politicians think it is
The argument that if you can see people, they must be working harder is presented as self-evident by commentators like Farage – but the best available evidence doesn’t support a simple “office good, home bad” story for productivity.
A major peer-reviewed study tested hybrid working (two days a week from home) in a randomised controlled trial of more than 1,600 employees. It found hybrid working did not damage performance, and it massively improved retention (quit rates fell by roughly a third). Hybrid didn’t turn people into slackers; it helped businesses keep good staff without a productivity hit.
Employer sentiment in the UK points the same way. In the CIPD’s 2025 research, 41% of organisations said increased home/hybrid working had increased productivity/efficiency, while only 16% felt it had decreased it. That isn’t unanimous (and it shouldn’t be, as different jobs and work cultures would generate different results) but it does demolish the idea that working from home is less productive across the board.
The House of Lords’ recent inquiry into home-based working put it plainly: there’s no single model that fits for all, and there is no solid evidence that the UK’s wider productivity challenges can be pinned on working from home.
Hybrid working is also a retention and recruitment lever for SMEs
For SMEs, flexibility is a key way to compete for top recruits against bigger brands that can offer higher salaries, and so far it’s been effective. The CIPD’s 2025 report found that around 1.1 million employees said they left a job in the last year due to a lack of flexible working, which adds up to a lot of churn, rehiring costs and lost experience.
The same CIPD research lists the top reasons employers are increasing flexible working: attracting and retaining staff (64%), supporting work–life balance (62%), supporting motivation/productivity (56%), and supporting mental health and wellbeing (55%). You don’t have to romanticise home working to see the business logic: flexibility helps people stay in work, and it broadens the talent pool.
Hybrid working isn’t code for “no office time”. The most common pattern in the CIPD’s data is a three-day workplace requirement (48%), followed by two days from home (32%). These employers are already calibrating schedules for “together time” and “deep focus time”.
Why flexible workspace exists at all
From my position working with hundreds of SMEs across the UK, what I see is not a mass desire to abandon offices, but rather a desire to use offices better.
For many teams, a flexible arrangement means:
- Office days built around collaboration: planning, training, client meetings, creativity and relationship-building.
- Home days used for ‘deep work’ like writing, analysis, calls that don’t require a room full of people and admin.
- Less wasted commute time and more autonomy, which often shows up as better morale and lower attrition.
A ban on home working doesn’t magically create better management – in fact, it can risk substituting coercion for clarity. If your culture is weak, forcing bums-on-seats rarely fixes it, but when your culture is strong, hybrid working can reinforce it.
The honest point: hybrid access is unequal and a ban makes that worse, not better
One criticism that deserves airtime is that hybrid working isn’t available to everyone. The ONS shows access is strongly linked to occupation, qualifications and income: workers on £50,000+ were far more likely to do hybrid work than those under £20,000.
But that’s an argument for smarter policy such as improving rights, fair access where roles allow, and investment in place-based growth: not for banning flexibility for the people who can work hybrid. A blanket ban would remove a valued option from millions while doing little to benefit those whose jobs must be done on-site.
A better question: what does ‘good hybrid work’ look like?
If we want the UK to be more productive, we should be pushing for better defined hybrid working arrangements, not banning it. That means:
- Clear expectations: what work needs to happen in-person, and why.
- Intentional office days: collaboration, mentoring and training, not just sitting on Teams calls from a different chair.
- Manager capability: leading outcomes, not presenteeism.
- Proper onboarding for juniors: hybrid can work brilliantly, but only if learning and support are designed in.
- Measurement that matters: customer outcomes, quality, speed and retention, not presenteeism
This is the pragmatic middle ground most employers are already moving towards, because it’s what employees want and what businesses need. Evidence increasingly suggests that it works, making talk of a ban feel more petulant than productive.
If politicians want to talk about hard work, fine, but hard work is not synonymous with a commute. The future is not “everyone at home” or “everyone in the office”, but rather designing work around outcomes, and using physical space for what it’s best at: martialling people, energy, learning and momentum.
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